Hacker News Reader

Sure, and you can look at a list of recurring meetings and people can cancel them. Or you cancel all of them and see which ones get recreated. One way is probably more effective.

Effective at what? In the short term, nuking all of them will get you fewer meetings, both wasteful and valuable. But it doesn't teach people much, except maybe that their bosses act arbitrarily. The better solution is to coach people on more effectively using company time.

The issue is what things default to. If you have to figure out if you need to subscribe to X or not, it's a meeting, get stakeholders, input, sign off etc all while you have other demands on your time. If you don't get through with it and figure it out, then that service goes to the default - i.e you keep subscribing.

On the other hand, if you cancel everything, then the default will be off. Essential services will require you to go through the hoops again because they are essential.

I think the point was startups shouldn't have non-essential expenses, full stop... if the churn of the nuclear option works out, you really need to ask how so much waste accumulated in the first place.

Exactly. If the the additional chaos and labor of the nuclear option works that much better, then it's a sign there is a significant ongoing cost-control problem. The nuclear option just masks underlying issues.

Being able to move fast means trying new things, not having tons of processes, and taking risks. It doesn't seem like an inherent problem if you sign up for stuff you actually don't need so long as you have the money to pay for moving fast. When you're short on money you need to be more cautious and course correct.

> The better solution is to coach people on more effectively using company time.

Have you done this in a managerial capacity before? Is what you're saying borne out of experience?

I'm skeptical because while "just coach people" is a nice sentiment - it is extremely hand wavy and ineffective at solving the actual problem.

Yes, "be a good manager" (basically what "coach people" means) is kind of hand wavy. As is any statement of "be good at your job".

But if you want specifics: A good manager doesn't need to drop a nuke on the situation: They've paid enough attention to be continuously evaluating their operations and, in the case of meetings or any thing else, asking themselves and their employees, "what are we doing here? what is the value of this activity?" and pruning things as they go. So, again: Maybe the nuclear option is needed in some situations, but if so, it means things have been poorly handled to get there.

"Cancel all recurring meetings" shouldn't be passed around as some trite startup productivity "hack" like the cliche "have all meetings standing up", like something everyone should thoughtfully consider as an insight into modern business culture norms. It should be spoken of in whispers to organizations so mired in their own incompetence that, in recognizing a problem, they can't even think of a good solution except to drop a nuke on themselves.

> So, again: Maybe the nuclear option is needed in some situations, but if so, it means things have been poorly handled to get there.

When we've done this, everyone on the team was on-onboard and bought in. It's not like people walked in one day and all the meetings were gone - that would break trust.

The fact that everyone agreed it was the only way forward doesn't mean something didn't go very wrong to get you there in the first place.

I'm not saying don't take this sort of action. And certainly, if you have to, the way you went about it is probably sensible. I'm saying that well-run operations don't have to do it at all.

In which case, maybe the labor of getting everybody onboard and bought in would be better put to getting everybody to learn to not create the problem in the first place.

I in fact have. It's not handwavey at all; coaching people on particular skills is something managers, mentors, and coaches do on a daily basis.

It can be very effective at solving the actual problem. If that actual problem is people not having a skill. Like good time management. Or judiciously using the time of colleagues.

I'm not sure which side of the issue you're coming down on... cancelling them all will quickly stop the unnecessary ones, yes. Some will be rescheduled quickly. But if your organization culture is bad enough to require this step, then it means in some cases people didn't know if they're meetings were useful. Some will believe them unnecessary until enough time goes by and you have a preventable disaster that would have been caught if people were coordinating properly.

So whether it's meetings or money, my point stands: If the nuclear option of cancelling everything is necessary, then things are being poorly managed to begin with, and after pushing that nuclear button you need to take a big step back and assess just how you screwed things up so bad that you had to drop a nuke on your enterprise to fix it.

I'm not speaking from a theoretical arm-chair stance on this either. I've been somewhere that took the nuclear approach in various policies. One expense-driven decision was to fire every single worker of a certain type because they thought the classification was being abused. It probably was, in maybe 15% of the cases. For the responsibilities being performed by the other 85%, it was a massive disaster. Essential things went undone. Part of my own job involved analysis of customer trends, and the resulting loss of revenue. Millions of dollars were lost to the nuclear option, not to mention countless hours of busy work justifying re-hires and jumping through hoops for them, all to save a fraction of the money & time represented by that 15%. Did the nuclear option work? I guess? Sort of? Was it worth it? Not in the case I'm speaking about. But even if it had been worth it, it still spoke to systemic issues that went above and beyond the particular problem solved by dropping a nuke on it.

Good lord man. Why not nuke all the buildings in a city and see which ones people want to rebuild?

No, a thousand times over no.

The existing meeting schedule is the carefully calibrated result of a thousand different constraints running into each other and finding a workable balance.

Why would you destroy that?

Best-case scenario, you add a ton of busy work for everyone to re-create the same thing, and everybody loses a quarter of a day trying to resolve who owns which meetings and is everyone back on them.

Worse-case, you inject utter chaos as only half of the needed people show up for key decisions and critical processes grind to a halt for a few weeks.

Sometimes I'm shocked at how cavalier some people can be about management.

>Sometimes I'm shocked at how cavalier some people can be about management

I find this attitude especially prevalent in the tech startup end of things for a few reasons: Most startups start small enough that peer-to-peer relationships and a personal stake & passion all mean that having staff in a role solely dedicated to managerial work isn't necessary. As a result of this, when they get larger, they undervalue the need. As a result of that, as the need arises, it is poorly done, furthering the sentiment that such roles are wasteful of resources and time.

Outside of this "home grown" disdain for managers in tech, there's also the problem systemic in modern business stemming from the idea of "scientific management" that arose about 100 years ago and really gained traction in the 50's & 60's. Depending on your point of view, it's either fundamentally wrong (in part or whole), or it has simply been poorly implemented in nearly all cases. Regardless, it's what gave rise to the notion that "manager" was a job like any trade, and people could be trained up and deployed as interchangeable pieces in any business. (Which rather ignored the fact that even in trades, there are specialties). It created a few generations of managers that thought actual detailed knowledge of a business's operations wasn't necessary to being a good manager.

I think we're, mostly, past that. (as in past the tipping point moving away from it, not that it isn't still prevalent in some segments of business)

But the two phenomena are where I think the casual disdain comes from in the tech industry for non-engineering managers.

>But the two phenomena are where I think the casual disdain comes from in the tech industry for non-engineering managers.

I don't disagree but I'd add that a lot of tech people are often (and often correctly) focused on some narrow aspect of a problem. At the same time, they're often not aware of or even outright dismissive of broader questions of company strategy, market fit, etc. So they think decisions that are made in a broader context than their particular project are clearly a pointy-hair-boss/MBA/etc. problem.

Also cancelling your credit card does not cancel your subscriptions! Try explaining to Salesforce that you don't really need to pay that bill, you see you cancelled the card...

Then explain the same thing to the factoring services, and to then to the guys that are hauling away your laptops and servers. Just cancel your service like a normal person/business, save yourself a lot of grief.

There are whole products and features dedicated to this problem [1].

Really though it’s a question of priorities and limited bandwidth. Usually for start-ups the priority is to grow top line whereas a few percentage points of extra OPEX is forgivable.

[1] https://brex.com/blog/managing-recurring-software-saas-with-...

Deliberately flying loose with procurement to move fast in the "low top-line, low OPEX impact" sense is not the same thing. That can still be deliberate, and have careful oversight. What I'm talking about is the inability to operate any other way, so much so that your best option when things get tough is the nuclear one. My thinking on this is simple: If an organization finds itself in a position where dropping a nuke on itself is actually a reasonable option, they have done something very wrong to get there.

Such nuclear options should certainly not be handed out as blanket advice or "something to consider". They should be spoken of in tones such as "If you've really screwed things up bad, then here's what you do....".

I've worked somewhere that such such tactics were common place. Sometimes they were the only way forward (and yes, that meant we had much, much bigger problems). Sometimes they weren't necessary, an over reaction, and the chaos & destruction took years to recover from. In one case we lost roughly $10,000,000 over about 5 years in order to save about 1/10th of that.

I don’t really understand the hardline stance.

In a start-up there are nearly infinite problems to solve and one of the most important skills is to figure out the sequencing.

So, you figure out what to sell, you figure out how to sell it, then you figure out how to build it.

After you can do that a bunch, then you fiddle with the knobs and controls to grow the business.

Early on, the top priority isn’t accounting because it doesn’t apply any leverage. It’s basically a downside risk problem and you do what you need to do and focus the rest of your resources on product, eng, and growth.